GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

What happens is we join up two schools
across the world via another hub gallery
or arts organization. We’re trying to
encourage them to go to their local one
but use us as a catalyst. The program is
based online where they share information
and ideas and eventually artwork.
As an example, one school from India sent
a series of photographs to their English
school and the English school did the
‘before and after’ photographs of what
they interpreted. To imagine, to look at
the composition, it’s all a brilliant way of
encouraging people to learn how to look
closely, because it’s got incredible purpose
to it for them—they try to find out about
each other.
The relationship between the paired schools
is forged throughout a year of joint enquiry,
assisted by artist-designed project packs.
Various kinds of artistic media can be used
and the creative results are uploaded onto
the project’s online gallery.
As the contemporary art sector has built
this reputation for experimentation, it
has become a beacon for business and
community organisations seeking to engage
with innovative practice and learning. Jenny
Simpson observes that “the more businesses
and organizations get hemmed in, I think
that drives their need to think about things
differently, and they look toward companies
like AWESOME Arts to build their own
ideas and their thinking.” In describing her
experience of partnering with industry and
community, she says “They come to us and
say, ‘We’ve got this great idea. You people
are crazy enough to do it. Let’s give it a
try’. Andrew Clark from the Queensland
Art Gallery explains this by saying, “they’re
attracted to the gallery because, to them,
we’re presenting creativity, and in the whole
corporate world at the moment there is big
talk that the businesses that will survive in
the 21st Century are the innovators, are the
creative ones.”
In Australia, building capacity through
community and arts organization partnerships
is now a priority. This is reflected in federal
government policy and programs such as the
“Creative Communities Partnership Initiative”
of the Australia Council for the Arts, designed
to stimulate innovation across arts and nonarts
sectors.
Business and community partnerships
for Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road
project grew to involve local residents and
shopkeepers, and a project base was installed
in the local neighbourhood called The Centre
for Possible Studies. Modeled in many ways
like a school, projects are structured around
three terms, curriculums can be proposed
and artists work like research fellows.
Another of the Serpentine Gallery’s projects,
Skills Exchange, supported by a range of
arts and non-arts partners, enabled artists
to collaborate with elderly people, market
traders, care workers and young people in
order to “swap skills and develop ideas for
social and architectural change.”
These kinds of partnerships and learning
collaborations create value and forge new
and visionary thinking that philanthropy
can support. The call for rigorous and highly
engaged arts learning can be heard in Anna
Cutler’s provocation:
When are you going to stop doing the
mosaic? When are you going to stop doing
the mural? When are you going to tell
them the truth, which is you are going to
do something really difficult, complicated
and challenging and exciting?
Crucially, as the sophistication of these
ambitious projects grows, so can the
resources required to produce them. The
Edgware Road endeavour, for example,
had to fundraise over a quarter of a million
dollars in order to be realized. As Sally Tallant
from Serpentine Gallery sees it, a significant
shift in traditional attitudes towards support
for these kinds of initiatives is essential.
Historically, she explains, “there’s a benign
philanthropic approach to the notion of what
education is and it seems to be a nice thing
to do to help the nice poor people and to
empower people.” Challenging this premise
she says, “it seems empowering as opposed
to what it actually is, which is a crucial part of
us understanding the world of the museum
and gallery as producing knowledge and…
creating value.” The point she ultimately
makes is that “we should be thinking this
is the most exciting work we do, the most
innovative work that we do. Not the most
worthy needy work that we do.”
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 61